CHAPTER IX

Week ending 16th December, 1899

The pleasures of Sunday were on the wane.  The outbreak of war had detracted little from its peace; but its dinners were—­oh, so different!  Sunday had formerly been in the main an occasion of abandonment to the joy of eating.  The propriety of such a custom may be open to question; but we had turned over a new leaf—­until the perusal of the old one would be feasible again.  Our bad habits were compulsorily in abeyance:  the “good tables” were gone.  The Simple Life is a splendid thing, but unless voluntarily adopted it sheds all its splendour.  Delicacies had long been falling victims to galloping consumption, and at this date had totally succumbed to the disease.  Worse still, the “necessaries” were more or less infected, and disposed to go the way of the dainties.  Meat troubles maddened everybody.  The beef was all neck.  Everybody said so.  Not one in ten, it seems, ever managed to secure a more tender morsel from the flesh of these remarkable bovine phenomena (for they were oxen, not giraffes!) The meat was indiscriminately chopped up in the shambles, and the odd one (in ten) who had not his legal complement of “neck” alloted him was just as likely to be given for his share—­to take or leave—­a nose, his due weight of tail, a teat or two, or a slab of suet, as any more esteemed ration from the rib.  It was laid down that favouritism had no place in Martial Law; but we were not all Medes and Persians in Kimberley.  The rush for meat between six and eight o’clock in the morning was one of the sights of the siege:  It sometimes happened that people, after a long wait, would throw up the sponge in despair and go home meatless; the odds were that they had not missed much, but their grievance was not the less real, nor their “language” the more correct, on that account.  There were persons who never tried to get meat; and they were probably the wisest—­’the world knows nothing of its greatest men.’  In the scramble for precedence a fight occasionally ensued.  The special constable did his best to keep order; but he had only a truncheon; he had no other weapon, not even a helmet—­that awe-inspiring utensil!—­to cow the multitude.  Numbers of people deliberately transgressed the “Law” by turning out at five in the morning to make sure of their meat; and the Summary Court was kept busy fining these miscreants ten shillings each, with the usual “oakum” alternative.  One lady (in a letter to the Editor) drew a vivid picture of the rush for meat.  She had travelled a good deal, she told us, and had “roughed it” on Boxing nights; she had been (unaffectionately) squeezed to suffocation in London.  But nowhere outside the Diamond Fields had she encountered the rudeness that springs from ten thousand empty stomachs!  Who now shall say that hunger is good sauce?